Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

1016, when Turkish forces defeated the Artsruni army, Prince Davit, son of King Senekerim Artsruni of Vaspurakan, traveled to Constantinople to seek support in exchange for the lands he inherited. Emperor Basil II, intent on populating the buffer region of Cappadocia/Sebasteia (Sebastia, Sivas) with Christians already hostile to Muslim rule, signed an agreement with Davit in 1019, which provided that the latter would serve as the strategos (governor) of the Cappadocian theme. More than 14,000 people left their homes and sought refuge in Sebasteia,68 including the nobility, government officials, and military leaders. In the meantime, Basil II transferred a large contingent of troops from the Bulgarian theater to Vaspurakan (Asprakania or Basprakania, under Byzantine rule) ostensibly to support the Artsruni kingdom, but instead in successive campaigns they attacked the regions of Taron, Manazkert in north of Lake Van, and Vaspurakan, a situation further exacerbated by subsequent Turkish-Seljuk invasions.69

After the fall of the kingdom of Ani, the Bagratuni branch at Kars, first established in 961 under Mushegh, the brother of Ashot III, assumed the leadership among the Bagratunis. Mushegh’s successors had failed to strengthen the kingdom at Kars and repeatedly clashed with their kinsmen at Ani, Lori, and Siunik. The Seljuks invaded Kars in 1053/54 during the reign of Gagik-Abas II, but withdrew from the city under attack by the Byzantine army, which captured Kars in 1064. Seljuks resumed their attack on Kars after they seized Ani; they retook Kars in 1065. King GagikAbas II petitioned Byzantine Emperor Constantine X Ducas (r. 1059–1067) for support, and the emperor agreed to the transfer of the Bagratuni dynasty in Kars to Byzantine lands in Cilicia. The Bagratuni kingdom of Kars ended with the death of Gagik-Abas II in 1081.70

Likewise, the Bagratuni kingdom at Lori (or Tashir-Dzoraget) failed to maintain a strong military presence to fend off Byzantine and Seljuk invasions. King Gurgen, the younger brother of Ashot III and after whose name the kingdom was called Kyurikyan in local dialect, had survived the military campaigns of Emperor John I Tzimisces in the early 970s, but his son and successor Davit Anhoghin (r. 996–1048) remained in constant conflict with the neighboring Arabs and Irano-Kurds. Too arrogant because of his early military successes, in 1001 Davit rebelled against King Gagik I of Ani, who in response invaded Lori and seized large tracts of land from him—hence the “Landless” name attached to Davit.71 Despite the tensions between the leaders at Ani and Lori, however, when in 1040 the Shaddadid emir Abuswar (Abu al-Aswar) of Dvin attacked Lori and it became quite obvious that Davit could not withstand the onslaught, King Hovhannes-Smbat of Ani, along with the kings of Siunik and Iberia, mobilized a force of 20,000 troops to defend Lori. Davit appreciated their assistance but was not willing to abandon his aspirations to win the throne of Ani. Immediately after the cessation of the conflict in Lori, he intervened

in the succession struggle in Ani occasioned by the Trebizond Will. The ruling nakharar families in the Bagratuni capital made it clear to Davit that he should not interpret the succession crisis as an invitation to usurpation or invasion, but he nevertheless led two military campaigns into the region of Shirak, causing much death and destruction. His reign ended in 1048 in total disgrace, leaving behind in Lori a considerably weakened leadership. When Kyuriké I (r. 1048–1089) succeeded his father, the Seljuk invasions into Armenia had intensified. In 1064 Sultan Alp Aslan led his army into the land of Lori and, after much bloodshed and pillage, demanded Kyuriké’s daughter for wife. The king of Lori refused at first, but further negotiations and mediation by the Abkhazian king Bagrat IV convinced him that the failure to grant his daughter’s hand to Sultan Alp Aslan would aggravate the already grave situation. By then the Bagratuni kingdoms at Ani and Kars had collapsed, leaving the kingdom of Lori as the only Armenian stronghold.72

Kyuriké found support among the Byzantine leaders who, albeit briefly, adopted a favorable policy toward Lori to forestall further Seljuk invasions. Cooperation from Byzantium enabled Kyuriké to assume the symbolic leadership of the Armenian kingdom, although Constantinople recognized him as curopalate or governor rather than as a sovereign monarch. Nevertheless, Byzantium also permitted the catholicosal ordination of Bishop Barsegh of Shirak (Barsegh I Anetsi) in Ani and also granted Kyuriké the authority to mint his own silver and copper coins.73 No sooner had he enjoyed some respite from internal and external difficulties than the Seljuk military victory against the Byzantine army at Manzikert in September 1071 altered the power configuration in the region, forcing the withdrawal of the Byzantine military. The kingdom of Lori collapsed in about 1100, and the kingdom Siunik, in 1166.

The last major Armenian kingdom in historic Armenia ended, as Byzantine and Seljuk invasions escalated. Aristakes Lastiverttsi, the eleventh-century cleric historian, commented on the Seljuk seizure of Mount Smbatay Berd (Smbat’s Fortress) during the collapse of the Bagratuni kingdom:

Such is your wicked history, o mountain! Mountain whereon God was not pleased to dwell, mountain of blood, of invasion, and loss. It is impossible to call you a mountain. Rather, you were a mud pit in which the entire population of the country was lost . . . . Oh mountain! You were not fertilized by the dew of Heaven like [mount] Hermon, but with the fat and blood of the corpses which fell upon you. Oh mountain! You were not, like mount Sinai, a medium through which Moses spoke with God; no, you silenced many priests singing the psalms, [priests] who by their prayers were always conversing with God.74

Arab conquests expanded to the eastern part of Cilicia. Their control lasted well into the tenth century, followed by Byzantine domination. Armenians, including the nakharar houses, migrated to Cilicia in large numbers from Vaspurakan, Ani, and Kars as a result of recurring Arab-Seljuk-Byzantine invasions and counterattacks, fueled further by the defeat of the Byzantine military at the Battle of Manzikert (Manazkert) in 1071. Many Armenians escaped the destruction wrought upon them by Alp Arslan and sought a safe haven in Cilicia.3 In 1065, for example, King Gagik of Kars surrendered his kingdom to Byzantium in return for safety in the Taurus Mountains.4 Emperor Constantine Monomachus (r. 1042–55) resettled Armenians in the region of Cappadocia and encouraged them to settle in Cilicia as well.5 By 1198 when Levon I was crowned as the first king of Armenian Cilicia, the international environment riven by intense conflicts between the Byzantine empire, the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, the Arab states, and the Crusaders restricted the foreign policy options available to the Armenian kingdom in Cilicia.6

As part of its grand geostrategic objectives, Byzantium sought to strengthen the Armenian leadership in Cilicia as a buffer between Constantinople and the Muslims.7 This strategy assumed that Armenian society would be sufficiently monolithic and strong to serve such a purpose and would be amenable to Byzantine interests. As in Greater Armenia, however, the Armenian leadership was deeply divided between factions favoring either an eastern or western orientation; unlike in previous centuries, however, those insisting on closer ties with the West clearly dominated Cilician politics. Nevertheless, factional divisions gave rise to enormous political difficulties. As a result, throughout its three centuries of existence, the Cilician kingdom remained highly unstable internally and highly vulnerable to foreign forces.

Some Armenian lords entered into service for the Byzantine empire, as did the Haykazun and Natalinian princes, who assumed the responsibility of guarding Cilician lands bordering with the Arabs. Soon, however, unwilling to tolerate Byzantine domination, some of the leading Armenian nakharar families began to establish their own dominion based primarily on Armenian forces. Most notable among them was Pilartos Varazhnuni (Philaretus Brachamius) of Vaspurakan, who had served as a general in the Byzantine military under Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (r. 1068–1071) during the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Immediately after the Byzantine defeat, Pilartos Varazhnuni, in cooperation with Arab forces, established his short-lived warlord state (1078–1085) stretching from Malatya to Antioch and Edessa and centered on Marash. In the meantime, he either converted to Islam or pretended to have done so; but he clearly advocated pro-eastern, pro-Muslim, and anti-Crusader policies. The Armenian Church, which adamantly supported Byzantium and the Crusaders against the Muslims, condemned him. After Varazhnuni’s death, a number of chieftancies emerged: Khoril at

Melitene, Toros at Edessa, Tatul at Marash, and Kogh Vasil at Kaysun.8 Byzantium tolerated Pilartos Varazhnuni’s and his successors’ territorial ambitions as long as they could help contain Seljuk expansion. By the second half of the 1080s, however, although Seljuk military capability proved too overwhelming for the Armenians, two Armenian dynasties, the Rubenians (named after their first leader Ruben) based at Vahka in the north and the Hetumians (named after Hetum) based at Lampron in the west, had established a political base for expansion and to experiment with kingdom-building in Cilicia.9 Equally important, Varazhnuni had inspired some Armenians who opposed the Armenian Church and were critical of the pro-Byzantine elite to cooperate more closely with the Arabs. Indeed, Armenian-Arab relations assumed particular significance approximately around this time when Muslim Armenians emerged as leaders in Fatimid Egypt. It was ironic that after the collapse of the Bagratuni kingdom in Greater Armenia in the 1040s and prior to the emergence of the Armenian kingdom in Cilicia in 1198, a Muslim Armenian dynasty would assume the reigns of government in Egypt.

THE FATIMID DYNASTY

Egypt was a peripheral province under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphates. Beginning in the middle of the ninth century, as the Abbasid caliphate showed signs of decline, slave soldiers assigned to Egypt by the Abbasids created their local dynasties that aspired to establish an independent empire of their own. The Tulunid dynasty of the famed governor Ahmad ibn Tulun led Egypt from 868 to 905, followed by the Ikhshidids from 935 to 969. In 969 the Fatimids, who traced their origins to Fatima, a daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and belonged to the Shi‘ite Isma‘ili movement based in Tunisia, consolidated power in Egypt under a new caliphate, which lasted until 1171.10 Like the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad, it claimed to represent the true caliphate, with similar aspirations for expansion that clashed with Byzantine geopolitical objectives across the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, despite the hostilities between Byzantium and its Muslim neighbors, Fatimid-Byzantine relations remained on friendly terms until the Fatimids sought to establish control over Syria and barred Byzantine merchants from markets in Egypt. In 975 the Emperor John I Tzimisces attacked Hamdanid Syria to remove the Fatimid army from the area. The Arab Hamdanid dynasty, named after Hamdan ibn Hamdun who posed a serious threat to the Abbasids in Baghdad until his family’s cooptation by the caliph al-Mu‘tadil into military service, beginning in 903 expanded its rule from Mosul to Aleppo, before it declined in 1004 largely as a result of the hostilities among the competing regional Buwayhid dynasty, Fatimid Egypt, and Byzantium.11